Izhitsa Ⱛ

Izhitsa answers to Greek upsilon and closes the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order. It carries no numeral value in this script, standing well past the end of the counted series, although the corresponding Cyrillic letter takes four hundred from the Greek value.

Like fita it exists for Greek rather than for Slavonic. It appears in words and names borrowed from Greek and is read as i or as v depending on the letters around it, following the Greek pronunciation of the period rather than any Slavonic rule. Its presence in a word is a reliable indication that the word came in with the scriptures and the liturgy.

Its name is unusual among the letter names of the alphabet. It is a diminutive built on the name of the letter izhe, so it means something like the small izhe, which makes it one of the very few Slavonic letter names derived from another Slavonic letter name rather than from a Slavonic word or from a Greek name. That derivation is transparent, unlike the names of most of the letters around it.

The letter closes both the abecedaria and the recitation.

Its position at the very end, after the letter for Greek theta, follows the same principle: the Greek letters that Slavonic needs only for Greek words come last, after the Slavic signs, where they can be learned last and used least. Both Slavonic alphabets arrange the tail of the order that way, which is one more of the structural agreements between them.

The last two letters of the Slavonic order are both Greek letters kept for Greek spelling, and putting them at the end says something about how the alphabet was arranged. The Greek order supplies the frame for the first part; the Slavic sounds Greek could not write are fitted in after it; and the Greek letters that Slavonic does not need for its own words are pushed to the very end, where they can be learned last and used least.

That arrangement is shared by both Slavonic scripts, and it is one more item on the list of things they agree about. The agreement runs through the order, the names, the sounds and the general structure, and stops at the letterforms and the arithmetic. Any account of the relationship between the two alphabets has to explain a pair of scripts that share almost everything except appearance.

Izhitsa is also where a reader of a later Slavic orthography meets the tail of this history directly. The letter survived in Russian church and civil printing for centuries after it had ceased to be useful, restricted to a handful of words, and was finally abolished by spelling reform. It is a Greek letter that entered Slavonic in the ninth century for a translation project and left it in the twentieth by decree.